It doesn’t seem like it would be intuitively true, but love features prominently in Jewish tradition. There are different kinds of love, all with the same Hebrew root (aleph, hey, bet, or ahavah). There is God’s love for Israel, the love we are commanded to feel for God, romantic love for a partner, love for our fellow Jews… and, more unexpectedly, the love God commands us to feel for the stranger.
The Torah commands us, repeatedly, to love the stranger, not just to coexist or to respect or to tolerate (i.e. Leviticus 19:24, Deuteronomy 10:19). It seems like a nice concept at face value, but as twentieth century biblical commentator Nehama Leibowitz writes, “Do we not often find the opposite to be true?” (New Studies in Shemot, p, 384). How often do we congratulate ourselves for simply being civil to strangers with whom we don’t see eye to eye?
Reading Leibowitz’s words, I worried that this idea of commanded love – if it’s even possible (it feels almost like an arranged marriage) – is somehow less real or meaningful than genuine love. Genuine love feels so powerful, almost like a bubbling up of emotion. Can commanded love ever be truly authentic?
However, I’ve come to read this ‘commanded love’ as a way of raising us up. Perhaps the goal of loving the stranger is not simply a law to be followed, but rather a moral north star, inspiring empathy. Ideally, as the Torah teaches, that empathy will lead to action: aiding and welcoming the stranger in our midst. The reminder to love requires that we hold ourselves accountable to do more than simply tolerate.
Maybe, then, empathy is at the heart of Jewish love. Maybe the broader concept is a simple admission: It’s hard to live ethically. It’s hard to feel connected to those whose lives seem strange to us. It’s not necessarily intuitive. But if we follow the generations of our tradition and strive to feel this ancient idea of ‘commanded love,’ we might end up with a larger sense of a tradition that strives to teach empathy for its own sake. And working on deepening empathy is a worthy goal for these and every High Holy Days.
Rabbi Ana Bonnheim is a proud member of Temple Beth El. She works for Hebrew Union College and Temple Kol Ami in Ft. Mill. She is married to Rabbi Asher Knight, and they are the parents of two sons.
